Sommersemester 2010

3-days Workshop:
Embodied Narratives of Autonomous Surveillance (Autonome Überwachung als korporealer Narrativ)
By robococo (Dr Petra Gemeinboeck and Dr Rob Saunders)


The aim of the workshop is to explore the concepts of autonomous surveillance, embodied performativity of surveillance politics and networking as an embodied process. Workshop participants will develop simple autonomous agents (robotic eyes consisting of a motorised pan-tilt cam head) that survey their environment. The agents express their “political/social” motivations through their movements and the embodiment of individual characteristics (e.g. curiosity, sneakiness, paranoia, etc). The performative embodiment becomes thus an investigatory lens for the act of surveillance itself. Narratives of social and political agendas drive the eyes’ attention and ability to detect and respond, and thus what and how they ‘see’. Put in a collective on the third day, the agents will communicate by surveying and responding to each other to produce an emergent, collective narrative.

The practice-led experimentations will utilise the Processing development environment, Open CV library, and a motorised web camera controlled by Arduino. The performative ‘act of surveillance’ can be developed in a range of ways, depending on the participant’s level of technical expertise: from a choreographic or dramaturgical to an autonomous or generative approach.

Lebenslauf Petra Gemeinböck als pdf

Lebenslauf Rob Saunders als pdf


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